Learning Outside the Classroom as a digital service?

I’m working on a project right now that involves looking at the Learning Outside the Classroom scheme. This has been running since 2006, supported mainly by DCSF. It began as a manifesto to promote schools getting out to explore the natural and built environment, to get active and engage with culture. It has now grown to include a Quality Badge for providers and guidance on how to get the best out of different sectors.

It looks to me a scheme that will survive whatever bonfire (and regrowth) of quangos happens after the election (though don’t hold me to ransom for saying it). One reason is that it has been established, and is well run, as an independent charity (the Council for LOTC). I also think it will succeed because it is comprehensive enough to provide an efficient infrastructure for maximum value. It’s not focused on single regions or sectors of provision.

However, the more comprehensive any scheme the more robust you need your information system to be. It is extremely difficult to portray the landscape of ‘enhancement providers’ or resources for schools. That challenge is being tackled by BECTA in a major taxonomic exercise in the creation of a digital content ecosystem for education. LOTC is only dealing with a subset of that, offers that are primarily outside the classroom. But I think their information system is rather confusing, as you can see in the sliding racks on their home page.  There are several categories of provider that don’t fit their categories, such as libraries and science centres. Museums and galleries are within heritage, which is unusual. There isn’t an overt attempt to explore a range of practice that blurs the boundaries between the classroom and beyond it (e.g. using mobile technologies or creating museums in schools). I wonder whether, if this could be redevised as a strongly digital service, responding to users’ own terminologies and heirarchies, it would function much better.

I needed to test Gliffy, a free online tool for making diagrams, so I spent a quick 20 minutes working up a visualisation that shows a spiral of provision outwards from the classroom. I didn’t particularly like Gliffy, and because it was a bit clunky, I didn’t make a very clear or finished diagram. But, the picture is starting to suggest a more complex but understandable way of categorising offers outside the classroom. The only issue is that my model assumes a fairly urban context for schools, where built environment is more accessible to them than countryside, wilderness or adventure. Most schools are in such a situation but not all. Maybe the LOTC service could be developed so that you could configure the map according to your context?

Overall the point I’m making is that LOTC has been devised mainly as a manifesto, an accreditation system and a means of ensuring child safety on trips. There is a mountain of great, worthwhile guidance in here but it is all one way, and relatively buried. It hasn’t been devised as a digital service. The website has emerged to provide information about LOTC. But this is different from an approach where tools such as visualisation, user tagging, data feeds and also a wider web strategy, are fundamental to the thinking about how the service can be effective.

If the brilliant LOTC scheme is to survive and be effective it should really be looking now at reinventing itself with digital engagement, including more voices of teachers, CYP and providers, and more visual content.

Moved to comment

I’ve been commenting on a few articles in the past week so thought I’d blog to share what’s been exercising me. The first was a piece by Jonathon Jones, art critic at The Guardian. He asked whether art critics should only critique the exhibitions they see or should expand their view to critique programming policies. Some curators had felt that he shouldn’t challenge their decisions about what and how they programme. I commented that he is right, that more public debate, leading to greater understanding, on how our cultural institutions deliver best value is extremely helpful to our sector. It seems a no-brainer to me but I may be wrong. Maybe people aren’t interested enough? Maybe it could lead to too much interference?

The other story was about Glaciergate. Robin McKie exposed the process by which the IPCC gathers and reviews climate science, suggesting that their systems have not embraced the open innovation, agility and transparency that is enabled by ‘we think’ technology. Errors can be challenged and new findings absorbed at a much faster pace. I didn’t comment on that aspect of his article though I do agree entirely. In my naivety I assumed that global research as important as the IPCC’s would have been entirely agile and open. Shifting it to be so should be a priority. Glaciergate has followed the. UEA email scandal in providing lighter fuel to the vandal fires of the climate deniers. The hacked emails referred to a blurring in a slight dip in one of several indicators that show a hockey stick-shaped (i.e. extremely steep) rise in temperatures. The glacier error seems to have been a mistake in transferring a date of 2350 to 2035 (the date when Himalayan glaciers may be entirely gone). My comment was that the Glaciergate coverage had ellided the real scandal of the IPCC 2007, that it didn’t account for methane emissions from melting tundra or, more startlingly, from polar melting, because of uncertainty about precise figures.

The third comment was on Mia Ridge’s blog Open Objects. Mia blogged in response to a laughable article by Simon Jenkins which set up heritage against technology, and was generally pretty negative about attempts to make collections more accessible through media. I commented that he is or has been a key player in heritage policy not just a journalist, implying that his view that technology threatens heritage is prevalent amongst the advisory class in culture and heritage. There is some important work to be done in advocating and demonstrating the validity of a new agile approach to technology applied to heritage.

There were lots of other interesting posts too, that I didn’t get round to commenting on, for example, Nick Poole predicting the post-digital age to come very soon, Mia again on why museums have preferred to put collections in Flickr Commons than Wikimedia, and Tony Butler writing an important post about museums in a no-growth economy.

I’m going to be writing a response to Tony’s post next, which will also be an article in the next Museum-ID publication.

My post on Museums Computer Group

I was asked to write a post on the weekly blog on the new Museums Computer Group. As I mention the Haiti earthquake, at the time assuming that its museums must have sustained substantial damage given the news that much of the city was destroyed. However, an ICOM report is just in and although it seems that some staff are missing and there is some damage/instability and risk of looting, the museums are at least still standing.

You can read it here too, but bear in mind it’s written for that audience…

Taking the baton from Mike Ellis to share some links and comments on stuff this week, it’s been hard to focus on what I’ve found interesting in our profession, as my attention has been so taken by the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. It does prompt reflection for us in that much of a capital city has been destroyed, including historic buildings and the lives and works of some practising artists. I can’t imagine how we would deal with that. Scientists now think that extreme storms, increasing in frequency with climate change, can trigger earthquakes. The susceptibility of  Haiti to natural disasters (repeated floods & hurricanes) is probably due to deforestation by its French colonisers. So much of the value of cultural heritage institutions has been about preserving things and buildings, but in some places like Haiti and as time goes on for many more places, that may become a very difficult challenge. That’s one reason why I believe digitisation of culture and knowledge is so important (as long as we do it as efficiently as we can). And digital tools aren’t just useful for posterity but for the ‘here and now’, for example in the way they’ve been so rapidly deployed to help the rescue effort, with satellite maps and data services for locating relatives and so on.

I wonder if the ‘emergency’ facing our sector, in the form of funding cuts to education and culture, will give us the impetus to deploy digital tools in more agile ways. This week both the Conservative and Labour parties made funding statements for culture at the RSA State of the Arts conference. Here’s a useful comparison and summary. In a scenario of funding cuts can we convince politicians that digital strategy can actually save money and produce value, and not just be a drain on budgets, with vague outcomes?

As we run up to the election, our various quangos are jostling to advocate the value of culture either through bold statements (like this from NMDC), through holding expert enquiries (like this from MLA) or through consultations (like this from ACE).

In the meantime, there is much to celebrate as museums & culture shift towards openness and collaboration. Here are two great examples:

The BBC and British Museum launched their major History of the World project. A positive reception has been obvious from so many tweets from regional partners announcing their contributions and schools getting excited about adding objects to it (e.g. Thomas Tallis @creativetallis on twitter).

The other good news is Culture24 releasing some sets of data feeds (venues, resources, events/exhibitions) with 3 levels of access (open, redacted, full), available in RSS, OAI-MPH & SOAP formats. This is just a pilot with more data & formats in the pipeline.

There’ll be more news to come over the next few weeks about open cultural data (for example about Culture Grid and DCMS digital strategies) and I’m pretty sure you in the Museums Computer Group will be the first to know. And the first to comment, bless you! Next to take the baton is Jim Richardson from Museum Marketing.

New decade’s resolution

A few days ago, Mark O’Neill, who is the CIO for DCMS, wrote a very brave and open blogpost about his depression. He said it was really difficult to write. I imagine that some of the difficulty is that when you’re a senior professional you feel that even a personal blog shouldn’t be on such matters. You worry that some will think an admission about your health to be improper or reputation damaging, even if you don’t hold such judgement about others who are so open. I think adherence to that sense of propriety is a hangover of the old British social order, which rejected empathy and expression in favour of self-discipline. This decade is going to be tougher than the last. The challenges of dealing with environmental, economic  and cultural turmoil are going to require discipline. I hope it will be a very different kind of discipline from the old wartime command-and-control self-denial. Discipline now must be about paying attention to your own and each other’s basic needs (mental health, food, sleep, security etc) and the personal resolve to deal with them efficiently. So many of us have invisible or complex health conditions, which can be more or less disabling, that we need to talk about them to know how best to deal with them. That doesn’t have to be the same as wingeing.

So, I was glad to see Mark’s post and I’m going to follow suit. This isn’t intended to be a confession, for effect or attention, but a summation of my needs so that I can resolve to treat myself. It’s a new decade’s resolution. I’m sharing it because by being open, others may be open and understanding is shared. Also, you can hold me to account.

Years ago I had glandular fever followed by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (or ME), which meant I was totally exhausted when I exercised my brain, had panic attacks and a big dip in my confidence for years. Although I’m much better, I still get symptoms when I’m working hard and stressed. I get bouts of extreme tiredness, cramps, dizziness, IBS and back pain. The longer these bouts continue, the worse they get (especially when my back ceases up) because exercising gets harder. I get more anxious that I need to earn money for my family and so I respond by working harder. Then I club the anxiety and pain on the head by drinking, not excessively, but more than is healthy.

I know precisely what makes me feel better: Walking in nature with a camera. Other things work too, like swimming, delegating work, not overdelivering, controlling my diet and not drinking. In the past 6 months I’ve done hardly any of these helpful things, or if so, only patchily and ineffectually. I love my work, and I quite like paying the mortgage, so I can’t take drastic measures. But I must take serious measures. It’s all very well to write lists: do more of this, do less of that. But they don’t really work unless you reorganise your life. Which really takes some hard thinking and support from other people. I had already reorganised my life by leaving a ‘proper’ job to set up my own business so that I had more control over my working patterns (and could hide away when I felt sick). I now need to take more advantage of the freedom that affords, to take more breaks, to work more rapidly and waste less screen time.

I also need to integrate what I enjoy most (exploring and interpreting environments) and what I feel is most essential (helping the cultural & heritage sector embrace actions to ameliorate and adapt to climate change). That doesn’t mean Flow Associates will stop doing digital and outreach strategies and content delivery for the cultural sector but it does mean I may not be doing so much of the donkey work in those projects.

Thanks Mark for making me write this and thanks to the other Mark for taking this seriously for four years.

Cultural learning sites

I’m working on a mapping exercise and need to source all the ‘umbrella’ cultural learning resources funded by MLA, Renaissance, Strategic Commissioning, Creative Partnerships, ISB etc. I’m not talking about individual museum websites but, for example, regional museum education portals or collaborations between several partners. I’m also not really looking for sites such as the otherwise excellent Untold London and I Like Museums, mainly because they contain no findable information about education or schools activities/resources (perhaps victim of the siloisation of target audiences in web planning).

I just couldn’t find any overview list of such resources where you’d expect, for example on DCMS, MLA or Culture24. The MLA and DCMS sites are understandably geared to telling people what they do, rather than helping people access cultural services. The MLA site just doesn’t provide comprehensive information, accessibly enough, about past and current initiatives,  though a redesign and restructure are in the offing. Culture24 is much more user-focused and rich but there is currently no highlighted section or browsing category for what I want, so that after too many clicks and searches I’d not found one relevant site. It may be true that educators mostly want to search for resources and activities on specific subjects, in certain areas, for certain learning needs. But there are many users (researchers, planners, funders etc etc) who need to access information about cultural learning services on a different level.

The point about such an index (or list, showcase, whatever) is that it could be created pretty quickly by anyone for free. But we have come to expect that some quango should commission it. So inspired by people like Mike Ellis who made a museum website in a day and Stef Lewandowski who rebuilt the extortionate and non-functioning Birmingham City Council website, I thought I would DIY. I’ll build my list in delicious for a start then see how the data can be used by anyone else.

But first, I need to gather the links. Hmmm. I may be some time.

If you have any to share with me on http://delicious.com/Biddy using the tag cllist or on Twitter @bridgetmck using #cllist

Children as our teachers

Frank Furedi in ‘Turning Children into Orwellian Eco-Spies’ warns that there are resonances of Stalinism in the new orthodoxy by which we use children to teach adults about climate change. I have concerns about the same phenomenon but I’m coming from very different perspectives on both education and the environment. I’ve also had qualms when meeting people who are convinced that the solution to climate change is to educate children. The reasons for my qualms are many: It’s too late to wait until children are running the world; they can’t vote until 18 so if we should focus on educating anyone it’s the late middle-aged and elderly, who make up the majority of voters;  it doesn’t seem fair to put the onus on children. The main reason I baulk is that The Government’s reductive and misguided response to every problem (the root cause of which is usually gross inequality or unchecked capitalism) is to add yet another subject to the curriculum. Firstly these expensive initiatives are based on a misconception, that children will learn by being taught a lesson, by teachers who have been told to deliver compulsory lessons. Secondly, every time a new lesson is added, the less time there is for learning that might help children adapt to a difficult future.

Furedi has written a book called ‘Wasted, Why Education isn’t Educating’ in which he decries the erosion of traditional disciplines by endless additions of trendy topics (for example in the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum). In the article he says that environmentalism is infecting every subject, such as geography and history (as if they’re not utterly relevant to those subjects). I’m not concerned so much about the death of traditional disciplines in schools, but more that those in power are so wedded to the idea of subjects per se, old or new, that they continually add more to the diet. I’m not so concerned that the environment is infecting every subject, than that ecological systems thinking has been and still is so absent from education. Furedi conflates environmental topics with ’scare-mongering’, but, on the contrary, effective environmental education is not about frightening people. It is about empowering them, helping them develop adaptive coping strategies. The more that is understood about a frightening scenario, the more people are able to resist and cope.

I suspect that if we framed school learning differently, whereby children had more involvement in deciding what enquiries are relevant, they would decide pretty quickly that the environment is pretty relevant. If we made clear to them that learning is about preparing for the future, that to live well in the future they would need to learn how to solve problems, co-operate, access knowledge and design new solutions, they would gravitate towards the biggest problems. Furedi’s position is that our current education philosophies undermine the authority of adults. I believe that adults (in affluent societies) have eroded their own authority by becoming infantilised, yet we form myths around the gravity and arduousness of an adult working life. We underestimate the ability of children and young people to think because we have forgotten how to think ourselves. We have progressed into a state of mature denial, treating problems too abstractly, too much in isolation and too much as issues for agonistic debate.

Ghost forests and ice

As we count down the last few days until the Copenhagen COP15 summit, the number of possible things I could blog about here is overwhelming. The numbers of events, exhibitions and initiatives hoping to tackle climate change is intense. I could write about Buy Nothing Day or the 350 vigil or the Wave, about the eARTh exhibition opening at the RA or about the RETHINK climate and contemporary art programme in Copenhagen. I could report about efforts to introduce greener energy around the world, for example, how Spain has exceeded its targets for renewables. I could, and I really should, tell you more about my business partner in Flow, Mark Stevenson, and his extraordinary travels around the world seeking reasons to be hopeful where scientists and change-makers are saving the planet. But you’d be better off reading his blog and then buying his book next year.

I could tell you all that and much more. Meanwhile, the bad news about the evidence of warming and resistance to act on it is relentlessly dripping into my Twitter stream. It’s difficult to be upbeat in the face of it. The climate negotiations are based on out of date predictions. Last night, I heard that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing 57 gigatonnes of ice a year (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) and that the temperature there is now 6 degrees warmer. Last week there were reports of over 100 icebergs heading slowly for New Zealand. If the sheet melts entirely the sea levels will rise by 64 metres. Almost the most depressing thing about that is that the predictional film most likely to come true is Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.

Angela Palmer is the artist behind the Ghost Forest which landed in Trafalgar Square last week en route to Copenhagen. She was so depressed by deforestation and its links to climate change that she couldn’t sleep about it. So she undertook a major challenge, went to Ghana and transported these stumps to Europe. I found the installation an odd experience, unsettling, being in Trafalgar Square surrounded by these great uprooted things while people looked on respectfully at this combination-at-once of creativity and destruction. The labels told us that some of the trees had stood as tall as Nelson’s column. We were just looking at the feet of the giants, all washed of their soil.

Afterwards I went over to St Martins in the Fields to the Hard Rain exhibition, which although unconnected to Ghost Forest, showed photos of the Ghanaian logging operations and other evidence of environmental destruction. There is an image of a small boy stretching out his arms in front of the disc of a chopped trunk, a vibrant orange colour. The text for this exhibition said ‘If we can understand the horror we can dare to hope.’ My next stop was another exhibition by Angela Palmer, called Breathing In, in the Wellcome Institute. This is the result of journeys to China and Tasmania to collect evidence of the effects of climate change and pollution on people’s lives. For example, she compares white clothes and face masks worn in both places, China showing itself as one of the polluted places on earth by the black grime.

I liked these three exhibitions and I was glad they had been made. But I felt a kind of tedium or hopelessness, a feeling that art as eco-propaganda isn’t going to work, all these images of destruction and dystopias, that it wasn’t actually planting trees but using them up.

My final exhibition that day was Points of View, about 19thC photography from the British Library. Having just been to see the Ghost Forest I was struck by the first image, blown up large, a ghostly tree, all brachial white against dark. This was the negative of An Oak Tree in Winter, the first photograph by Fox Talbot, the first photographer, the image itself a ghost. He was excited that in a few seconds you could make an image that would take a skilled artist weeks or months. This process is still something we can get excited about, and photography is a primary means by which artists show us the abuses of nature and peoples around the world. But it is all part of the mechanisation that accelerated the materialism which has brought us to this state.

The next day I went for a walk in Honor Oak, up to One Tree Hill and found myself transfixed by an oak tree. A man came along the path and stood there quietly looking at it with me, then after a while he nodded, smiled and walked on. Oaks were planted by Joseph Beuys in his 7,000 oaks work in Kassell and are still being planted around the world in a legacy to that project. The  tree of doors and of endurance.

Connecting cultures in museums

This week Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, was allowed for the first time to appear on BBC Question Time. For non-UK readers, the BNP is an all-white, far right party which promotes sending non-whites (especially muslims) ‘home’ and which has denied the Holocaust. In June this year, the BNP won three council seats and two European Parliament seats, with Griffin representing the North West of England. A shocking poll in 2006 showed that 59% of UK people share their views on immigration, although they don’t all vote BNP.  As we come up to Remembrance Day, many of those 59% people will be wearing poppies to remember the war against unthinkable fascism, without thinking of the irony.

In response to Griffin on Question Time there has been a lot of Twitter action. Quite a lot of comments were about the role of cultural learning and museums in changing the hearts & minds of those 59%. @51m0n (Simon Berry of the Cola Life project) tweeted: “In Anne Franks’ House. Harrowing. Nick Griffin where are you?” @KevAdamson suggested Griffin should go on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

The realisation that so many share these views, or versions watered down by blithe ignorance, has thrown into sharp focus the purpose of proposals for the transformation of the museums sector. These proposals under the Open Culture banner are about driving digital inclusion into communities and harnessing the digital for cultural participation. Put like that, it sounds a little uncompelling, more than a little perhaps. But when you look at the context, the urgent need for co-operation and problem-solving in communities, and when you have experienced of the power of museum learning and engagement, the success of the proposal seems essential.

In the same week as Griffin’s appearance I started working on a project for the Equalities & Human Rights Commission. This is the Young Brits at Art awards, which are about using culture and creativity to promote the values of respect, dignity, fairness, equality and autonomy. When Griffin came on screen I had just been writing about the scientific facts proving that the notion of a human subspecies is a cultural construct not a biological one. In other words there is only one human race, though many cultures.  The science is complex and the history of cultural and genetic interweaving on a global scale is massive to understand. You need to grasp the complexity to get the basic facts. One of the best ways to grasp the complexity is to explore museums (real or virtual) and to participate actively in cultural learning, for example, getting into archaeology.

This is all intensive work, intensified by the many other requirements of museums to solve all social ills. Cultural tolerance isn’t the only value we need to develop. We also, urgently, need to support people to develop adaptability to face a disrupted future due to climate change, not a need yet fully acknowledged by the Government. We’ve spent the past 10 years revamping our displays and buildings, building new ones, expanding our shops, and spending quite a bit of money on it all, including a bit of digitisation. Cultural and heritage institutions are more often driven by trustees and managers from hard-nosed business backgrounds, who help spend this kind of money and attract more. You might wonder then why, despite all this expansion of cultural provision, and its claims of effectiveness, are we still seeing these intolerant attitudes in so many of the population? Three reasons (amongst many) come to mind, the first two on a big scale: Global inequality has exacerbated extremist terrorism, leading to greater mistrust of ‘others’. Labour has not tackled the root causes of economic inequality, despite many non-economic initiatives. Thirdly, there has not been enough investment in the most effective kinds of cultural learning in the museum sector to make good work reach enough people and to be sustained. The bulk of investment has been in bricks and mortar, style, spectacle, collections, marketing and so on. The dominance of the business-and-tourism-led management of our cultural sector, fails to adequately value the relational work of those who deliver educational and participatory engagement.

There are, however, many success stories and good things happening within all this investment. These good things tend to be where there is integration between the display (or accessibility) of collections and the relational work to interpret them. For example, the Ashmolean Museum has not only created a new building but has altered the structure of displays and all the interpretation to reflect the formation of cultures through exchange. It’s a shame then that the first press coverage of this revamp by the Times has been to accuse the Museum of ‘dumbing down’ and catering for ‘half-wits’. Kathy Brewis sees museums exclusively as a place to switch off at the weekend from her busy ‘digitally included’ life, to wander the old cabinets of curiosity in a graciously vacant but already well-educated manner, gazing on the otherness of heads shrunken by barbaric people who are not like us. She says she doesn’t want to “discover how civilisations developed as part of an interrelated world culture”. She may already understand the complexity of cultural connections so well she has no need of learning further, but I suspect if she did understand she would realise the responsibility she has to disseminate this knowledge and would make better use of her privileged position as a commissioning editor of The Times in doing so.

There is some truth in what she says, albeit expressed in a way I find offensive. I believe that we have put too many words on the walls, sometimes stating facts too baldly, which has reduced the emotive and aesthetic effect of collections and heritage spaces. The most effective learning takes place through dialogue, mediated in relational and creative ways. A plan to transform the sector needs to focus on making this kind of learning available to all, and that has to mean using digital technologies in many new ways and also working in partnership with public service broadcasters.

Constructing effective museums

I wrote this post on my trip to Washington last week….

I’m sitting in the vast atrium of the National Building Museum. Like most big buildings in Washington its classical style looks ridiculously overblown on this scale. The columns, big as giant cedars, are fakely gilded. I expect any moment a throng of lions and spear-touting soldiers to appear and play out a Ben Hur style epic. Instead around me are big men, not in togas but in the uniform of chinos and clutching takeout coffee, talking loudly about construction projects. Though Washington is not a skyscraper city it is one of monumental high-spec buildings, very many of which are museums and memorials. It’s a city in memoriam to a long past America as if it is an ancient civilisation. America borrows, buys or, you might more positively say, salvages or earns this heritage and then pays it respectful homage in its museums. The overall effect of trawling all Washington’s museums is to feel that America believes itself to represent the descendancy of the universal civilisation, as if it is an ark or a higher ground following all the bad times, the unsettling age of diaspora. The message is: At last we can settle, build and cohabit.

This belief seems to power America’s official (if not entirely widespread) acceptance of its cultural diversity. Washington’s museums act for the nation as a kind of camera obscura reflecting the world and space beyond, its realities inverted. Because the museums are so closely set together the juxtapositions, say of the Museum of the American Indian next to the Air and Space Museum, make for some uncomfortable ironies. Each museum makes its own statement, a particular mix of pride and sorrow.

This is a city besotted with the statement that you can make with buildings. One display at the Building Museum is about the utopian plan of early Washington, which aimed with its architecture to create ‘grandeur befitting greatness’, to give proof that America was leading on the world stage. Mike Edson, the Smithsonian’s Director of Web and New Media Strategy, believes that the city’s museums don’t accept that they can more effectively realise learning and social change using the web and distributed media. He says they have to get over their love affair with bricks and mortar. I agree with him in many ways. A display about sustainable communities in the Building Museum was empty of visitors whereas some of its content was distributed in panels on Metro trains, reaching thousands of commuters every day. Any space that has been taken over from the Earth needs to be used with responsibility. The question ‘what is the most responsible thing you can do with museum space?’ is a fraught one. When the British Library was scoping what it should do with some unused land in Camden I suggested it should be a community permaculture garden with an outdoor sheltered wifi workspace. Of course I didn’t mention the idea often or loudly as it seemed mad. If you can get sponsorship for a building, which gives a public monument to the sponsors, then surely that’s the only sane course? The Library decided to build a digital access centre, as it is easier to get funding for a new building than for updating existing digital infrastructure.

We might think that the old approach which simply put stuff on display is comparatively irresponsible and that we must construct ‘rides’ or immersive narrative spaces. I’ve been on some great museum ‘rides’ and I know they’re popular. But the ride approach is expensive and difficult to get right. Often there is too much noise, too many words and you are bombarded with messages. You feel you can’t rest in a space and simply look, draw, talk and reflect. The old gallery approach can at least create more space for a variety of interpretations and activities.

On my last day, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, only 5 years old, with interpretation that is very thought-provoking and moving. I wandered into a large research centre on the top floor, with banks of PCs, a library and some education rooms. No visitors were in there. I talked to a Guatamalan woman demonstrating weaving. Then, I met Caleb Strickland, who worked at the Museum. I asked him why the centre was so empty. He said this was a problem they were trying to fix and they would have to rethink the space. The separation in this museum’s functions between immersive narrative spaces and investigative/reflective/creative space was too extreme. They need to take some of the museum into the research centre and put the web on those PCs at the very least. But, then I went down to the restaurant and realised what the radical solution could be. The restaurant was totally packed. It offers 6 stations of food from different American Indian cultures. In contrast to standard American food, this was exciting and healthy, and leading visitors to talk to each other about what they were eating. It was buzzing. Now this is where the museum was happening. What if the restaurant could be expanded, with more interpretation here about Indian cultures, with art installations, cooking demonstrations and cultural performances? And in turn, could a redevelopment of the research centre be inspired by the restaurant?

This idea was sparked by some things that Nina Simon had said in a meeting to discuss a new Learning Lab for the National Museum of Natural History, including her plans to create a cafe as a cultural venue. I’d be interested to hear about examples of museum development projects (or outdoor heritage/public art etc) which go beyond the orthodoxy of immersive narrative space without denying meaning-making. I’m thinking of spaces that make the best use of people being together in a physical building, where people can be creative, share ideas and stories together, follow their own investigations and, most importantly, develop skills and plans to take action to make a better world.

Letter from America

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Washington DC, a few minutes from Capitol Hill, writing this post for Blog Action Day. The theme for this Action Day is calling on Obama to tackle climate change at Copenhagen and beyond. I was going to blog about the reason I’m over here in Washington, working for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose vision is ‘understanding the natural world and our place in it’.  The museum is planning a fantastic new space and programme that aims to change people to take responsibility for our planet. But before writing about this I have to get something off my chest: I am really quite shocked by the unsustainable lifestyle here. I knew the facts about America’s consumption and emissions and I’ve visited twice before. I did think though, that there must have been some change in response to the climate crisis. Nope. Everyone looks blank when you mention environmental reasons for wanting less plastic, air con or paper, as if they haven’t heard the news. They pat their mouths with another paper napkin from their personal pile of napkins, rather than licking their lips, and ask if they can get you anything else, as you seem a bit dissatisfied. Because, really they are exceptionally warm and friendly people here in Washington and I’m not being sarcastic about that. This isn’t personal at all. It’s about the norms that people accept.

The food here can be relatively tasteless or crude tasting, and is always in vast portions, so that loads is wasted or causing obesity, and if it’s not hot it’s tooth-achingly chilled. It’s a society that finds it easy to complain about poor service but there are no complaints about this waste.  If the Americans had heard the news they would surely feel sick and at least show signs of wanting to change. But I see hardly any messaging in advertising, news, retail and hospitality services to be more sustainable.

They can’t have heard the news, not understood its meaning or just won’t believe it. Maybe they really haven’t seen the news. It is true I’ve seen no single mention of environment in two thick Washington Posts, delivered unwanted to my hotel door, which doesn’t appear to have any environment coverage at all judging by its website navigation, even as Obama is today involved in climate summits with India & China. Climate protests in Washington, such as Power Shift in February, seem more fully covered by The Guardian than Washington papers.

The news on one level is pretty simple. It’s as simple as a tiger leaping into your face. If you saw a tiger coming at you, you would panic, run and/or die. Unfortunately we don’t see it. We kind of see it, but we interpret it as something all cuddly, frozen in time or not there at all like the tiger leaping out of a display in the Museum of Natural History. We are so used to seeing the natural world as if in a diorama, threatening but safely distant. Actually, the news is worse than one tiger coming at us. It’s us going at all the tigers, and going at many 1000s more species of animals and plants, including our fellow humans. It’s us having become a ‘force of nature’ and accellerated geologic time, as Alan Weisman describes in A World Without Us.

Bill McKibben helps make it clear with his 350 campaign. The planet has never before seen more than 300 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are currently at 390 parts and rising. We need to get it down to below 350 to sustain some semblance of liveability on the planet. Above 350, as McKibben says ‘you can’t have a planet’.

So, Americans, you understand the concept of choice. What do you choose? Asking for a bigger portion of steak now or a liveable planet for your own future years and your children’s? We’re not talking about your descendants, we’re talking about you. Ask everyone who has any power, whether it’s the power to stop serving individual plastic bottles of water, or the power to change the law to reduce emissions, to make the change because you demand better service.